In your opinion, with the cost being > $100, why is this better than three Raspberry Pis, or two BeagleBone Blacks, or a Raspberry Pi and a Leonardo clone and a week's worth of lunch out?

They did a good job on the campaign, though! $450k raised with asking for $27k is going to pay for a lot of lunch for the developers :-) Good choice of Arduino and Android/ioio compatibility to leverage existing ecosystems!

In your opinion, with the cost being > $100, why is this better than three Raspberry Pis, or two BeagleBone Blacks, or a Raspberry Pi and a Leonardo clone and a week's worth of lunch out?

They did a good job on the campaign, though! $450k raised with asking for $27k is going to pay for a lot of lunch for the developers :-) Good choice of Arduino and Android/ioio compatibility to leverage existing ecosystems!

If I had to make my own robot, I could go with any microcontroller or single board computers. I would go with Beaglebone Black. But I am developing a mobile land platform that will be used for research in our school. The researchers come from different backgrounds, some are experts in robotics and embedded programming, some have little to no experience. Furthermore, our school has been using Arduinos for the past few years, and now the school invests on raspberry PIs.

I believe the combination of Arduino and Raspberry PIs on a single chip will make easier transition for those who have worked with one or the other.